On the evening of September 10, 2001, Marie-Jeanne and I joined a group of celebrants on the private yacht of the owner of Forbes Magazine as the guests of Robert Lenzner, an old college friend who was a Forbes columnist then, for a cruise around New York Harbor. It was a very rainy night and we both remember looking up and admiring the World Trade Center not far off shore.

I awakened normally the next day and was having breakfast with MJ at home in Riverdale, the Bronx, when my son Michael called from his apartment in the lower East Side, on Attorney Street. He said “turn on your TV. There’s been a plane crash at one of the towers of the World Trade Center.”
And of course while we were watching we saw the second plane hit the other tower. It was clear then that this was a major act of terrorism.

I was the editor of the very young New York Times on the Web, which was then six years old. I quickly learned that I could not get into Manhattan because all roads and public transportation were closed. I called the office, hoping someone had gotten in.
Happily Fiona Spruill, who had been hired just out of Duke University, was the day editor. I asked her to recall the drama of the day.

“I came in right between the first and second plane crashes. Jad Walker and Dan Bigman [the business editor of the website] were the only people in the office on the news side. I was thrown immediately into the middle of this crazy story. We then began having serious technical issues. It became very difficult to publish the site. We had a lot of trouble. We never actually went down. It took a while for people to get into the office. It was a very scary period.

“There were a lot of very stressful moments. It was the first time in my memory that the newsroom at the paper really thought about getting information into the web site in a kind of productive way.”

Naka Nathaniel, who was one of our most versatile editors, was able to take a picture of the second crash from his perch along the Brooklyn waterfront, We published it. Serge Schmemann, our illustrious Moscow and Bonn correspondent, who covered the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, was now in New York, and wrote the lede story that day.

As a kind of postscript, when I finally got into the office on September 12, I was struck by what seemed like an avalanche of emails from around the world. I had to assign three editors to just sort through the mail. One example: “I’ve never much cared for you arrogant, pushy and noisy New Yorkers, But after Sept. 11, I’m using adjectives that are much more appropriate descriptions…like ‘courageous’ and ‘resilient.”.